English Language Teaching Global Blog

#EFLproblems – Getting students to speak

We’re helping to solve your EFL teaching problems by answering your questions every two weeks. This week’s blog is in response to Shreya Kakkar’s tweet about getting students to speak.

There’s a change of plan in this week’s blog from Professional Development Services. This week, we are responding to Shreya’s challenge for getting students to speak by referring our readers to the blog, Teachers tell us about their classroom speaking challenges. This blog is based on a survey of over 500 teachers and students giving their top speaking challenges. Responses to the challenges will be shared on this blog from January to April, so be sure to look out for further articles about speaking challenges.

Invitation to share your ideas

Have you got an EFL problem that you’d like for us to address? The best way to let us know is by leaving a comment below or on the Solving your difficulties as an EFL teacher – #EFLproblems blog post. We will respond to your challenges in a blog every two weeks. Most blogs will be followed by a live Facebook chat to discuss the challenge answered in the blog. Be sure to Like our Facebook page to be reminded about the upcoming live chats.

The Professional Development Team has 65+ years of teaching and training experience between us. We regularly attend and speak at local, national, regional and international conferences as well as running workshops and seminars and delivering webinars to teachers all over the world. We take part in social media channels such as facebook and twitter and do our best to stay up-to-speed with current trends and discussions through various media (blogs, new publishing etc.) and by talking to and working with other educators (teachers, trainers, authors etc.).

I am a teacher and administrator in a reputed college in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. We have about 25 teachers of English from the 3rd grade up to the 13th. We’re going have a meeting for the teachers regarding ‘How to improve their knowledge of English.
We hope to prepare a questionnaire similar to “Ask yourself these questions” that I just found in the previous article of this blog.

One of the questions was:

What do I want my students to do or learn?

My questions is, could you please suggest some other general questions or any other pedagogic ideas – not specific, something general would do.

FOCUS: Any or all of the skills (Reading, Writing, Listening, Speaking)

The staff of teacher will be highly delighted to hear from you. If I receive any response from you, I will forward a copy of it for the principal of the college. Moreover, you will be briefed regarding their responses.

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